Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ 2025

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ!

Letting go is never easy. The hardest moments in life often involve standing at the edge of something beautiful and watching it disappears into the distance. Whether it’s watching your child board a plane for college, closing the casket of someone you deeply love, or hugging a friend goodbye at the airport, your heart clenches in protest, asking, “Why does it have to be this way?”

Today, we hear about Jesus’ Ascension — the moment when He blesses His disciples and leaves them. They stand there; eyes fixed on the sky, watching the One they love vanish into Heaven.

And yet, strangely, Scripture says: “They returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Joy? After a goodbye?

Let’s sit with that mystery today: Why did Jesus have to leave, and why is His departure good news for us?

When I was a young priest, I visited a nursing home where an elderly woman shared her story. She had lost her only son in a car accident. He was just 21. She told me how she kept his room exactly the same for ten years — his shoes by the bed, his posters on the wall. She wept when she said, “I knew he was gone, but I couldn’t let go.”

We understand that. Love wants to hold on.

But real love - the kind of love Jesus shows us – does something braver. Real love blesses... and then lets go.

Jesus could have stayed. He could have remained visible and walking among us. But He knew that if His disciples clung to Him as He was, they’d never become who they were meant to be.

Notice the transformation: before the Ascension, the disciples are uncertain, scattered and afraid. But after Jesus ascends, they become bold, confident and joyful. Why? Because He had planted in them His Spirit.

You see, His going wasn’t an absence, it was an invitation. By ascending, Jesus wasn’t abandoning them - He was entrusting Himself to them. No longer would His love be limited to one place or one body. Through the Holy Spirit, His presence would be within them, within us.

A mother once told me about the moment she left her daughter at college. She cried the whole six-hour drive home. But that same daughter, a few years later, would call her and say, “Mom, I finally understand what you taught me all those years.”

Letting go allowed the child to grow. So it is with Jesus and His Church.

St. Luke tells us something beautiful - don’t miss it: “As he blessed them he parted from them…” (v. 51)

He didn’t stop blessing them to leave. He left while blessing them. And that blessing never stopped. His hands may have disappeared into the clouds, but His grace continues to pour down. His love did not retreat - it expanded.

When you stand at the foot of a grave, when you sit in the silence of an empty room, when you feel like Jesus is gone, remember this: He blesses as He leaves. He withdraws so that He may live within you.

St. Luke says they returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Why joy? Because now the mission was theirs. Because now they understood - this love is not lost, it is multiplied.

The Ascension is not the end of Jesus’ work. It’s the beginning of ours.

A soldier I once met at a Memorial Day Mass told me that after his best friend died in combat, he spent months asking, “Why him and not me?” But eventually, he realized the only way to honor his friend’s life was to live – to make his friend’s goodness visible in the world. “I carry him with me,” he said, “in the way I treat people, in the way I raise my kids, in how I show up for others.”

That’s what Jesus calls us to: to carry Him into the world. Not with heads in the clouds, but with hearts on fire.

Jesus ascends not to leave us, but to be everywhere with us. And He’s still blessing us in bread and wine,
in the quiet moments of prayer, in acts of kindness, in the whisper of hope that says, “I am with you always.”

Let’s not be afraid to let go of what was, so we can embrace what God is still doing. Let’s lift our eyes to Heaven not in sorrow, but in expectation. The work is ours now. The blessing continues. And the Lord who ascended will come again. Amen.